


Numbers

by fangi



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: #shittydadsclub2k16, #stopshittydads2k15, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Divorce, Family Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-03
Updated: 2016-03-03
Packaged: 2018-05-24 12:47:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6154195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fangi/pseuds/fangi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dan’s dad walks out and it throws his world into question in a way that sort of makes him want to sleep forever and also sort of makes him want to break something. But he’s got it under control. Really.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Numbers

**Author's Note:**

> I looked up these statistics sometime around late 2014 I think and I never finished this fic so I am sorry if these are not up to date but, forgive me, I was way too lazy to check and see if they were still accurate.
> 
> Read on Tumblr: http://fangi-thoughts.tumblr.com/post/127238844607/numbers

Daniel Howell is one face out of billions of others and he doesn’t have much to make up for that. He’s plain and boring and brown and he picks at his nails too often and doesn’t go outside enough. He can do weird things with his wrists (one of about three hundred fifty-seven million other people) and he’s left-handed (one of about one billion seventy-three million other people) and being bisexual isn’t something anyone should consider “out of the ordinary,” anyway. And maybe he spends a little too much time on the internet and he looks at statistics a few too many times a day but it’s what he does and this is how he is and he deals with it.

He deals with it.

“Dan?” (Over 1.5 million Daniels in the US alone)

His head jerks to the side and he’s supposed to be watching this movie and he’s not. Phil is looking at him strangely and Dan flinches when he meets his gaze. “Yeah?”

“You alright?”

And Dan knows what Phil is talking about, of course he does, and that question is much more specific than it has ever felt before and no he is not alright he’s not okay and if Phil hadn’t come to get him this afternoon the silence of his house probably would’ve choked him and yes he’s grateful to be laying on Phil’s couch instead of his own but no he is not alright so he just says, “Yeah.”

And Phil opens his arms and Dan crawls across the couch and curls himself into Phil’s chest and tries to lose himself in the smell of the skin of the only thing he can believe in.

.

He has to go home the next day, anyway. Because his mum asks him to.

And if his stomach drops when he reads that text, he doesn’t tell anyone.

.

His dad tries to have the “people make mistakes” talk with him that night. I know this is all hard for you, Dan. You have to understand, okay, Dan? This is hard for me too. It’s hard for all of us.

All of us all of us all of us as if they are an “us” anymore as if they’re a unit still as if 

He hears his mum crying, just down the hall, the entire time.

(And he doesn’t know what to do he doesn’t know doesn’t know doesn’t know)

(So he handles it)

.

He is just another statistic. (Forty-two percent of marriages end in divorce.) But today the numbers don’t feel as solid, as comforting as before, no, because there aren’t any statistics available like “houses that don’t feel like home, one out of every ten families in the UK” or “Dads who walk out for idiotic reasons, four out of five” or “children who have to start taking care of their drunk mother who can’t handle it but neither can they so who’s actually dealing with all of their problems no one no one no one, three out of every five children in the world.”

He sleeps on the couch that night because the lamp in his room lays in pieces on the floor from where his dad got angry the night before (You have to understand me, Dan! You have to understand where I’m coming from here, you ungrateful—), and all Dan has ever been good at in his life is talking back, anyway (don’t try to explain yourself to me, don’t, I’m not the one who you need to talk to, stop stop stop stop stop). His dad stormed out and hasn’t been back since and Dan can’t find it in himself to be upset that he’s gone, but only about the mess that’s been left behind for Dan to clean. His stomach lurches. All he wants to do is sleep.

(And he can’t, he can’t he can’t he can’t and he doesn’t know why except the pounding behind his eyes and the smell of alcohol from the room next door probably means something in the long run, and probably means something right now.)

(But he’s handling it. He’s fine. Everything is fine.)

.

“’Lo?”

“Phil, Phil oh my God Phil please wake up please—”

“Dan? What, what’s going on—”

“She’s not waking up oh my God Phil Phil please—”

“Who isn’t, Dan, slow down, talk to me—”

“—God Phil please come help me please I don’t know what to do I called 999 but I don’t know what to do I don’t know—”

.

Dan turns eighteen in a hospital waiting room (and there might be a statistic for birthdays in hospitals, but God he’s too tired to look it up) with his head on Phil’s shoulder and a chill in his bones he can’t shake. Phil talks to nurses in hushed voices for him, and Dan has never been so thankful for someone who’s better at being a person than he is. And he wants to tell Phil that, but he can’t force his throat to work, not right now.

His mum gets discharged two days later, and he wants to make her swear to him she’ll never drink again, but she just smiles in a way that’ll be etched in his brain until the day he dies. (There are 1.6 million people dependent on alcohol in England.)

She moves in with her sister for a while. Dan packs his things and moves to London with Phil.

His dad doesn’t call.

.

The afternoon sun is warm and makes his skin beneath the cotton sheets of Phil’s bed feel sticky, and he has surrounded himself in a world of pinks and reds that paint Phil’s pale skin better than any artist ever could, and everything is a little less gray today, maybe. Outside, a dog barks and no one answers him. The neighbors up above have been talking for the last fifteen minutes and their voices drone and hitch like a radio not tuned quite right. He thinks John Coltrane, maybe, would be fitting background music for right now.

Dan runs over the piano backing to his favorite jazz piece with gentle fingers on his own stomach, and he traces the gentle curves and sharp edges of Phil’s face with his eyes, watches as his skin shifts from orange to pink with the setting sun.

(There is no accurate census for homosexual relationships in the world. He likes to think that maybe they’re more common than people assume.)

.

The house forecloses, and Dan wants to be upset about his childhood home, he does, but he can’t find the energy to be any angrier than he already has been. He plays the piano for hours after he hangs up with his mum, and after a while Phil brings him tea and sits beside him and it’ll be alright it’ll be alright it will be okay.

(He’ll handle it.)

.

He gets a gig at a local coffee shop that pays pretty well and lets him keep tips if he’ll come and play the piano every Tuesday and Thursday nights. Phil works a nine-to-five but is there every night, anyway, sipping on some chocolate heart attack mocha-something-or-another and writes skits and stories in a booth off to the side where Dan can see him but is not quite able to pretend he’s the only person there.

It calms his nerves more than he will ever admit. (Ninety percent of all people experience stage fright.)

Phil calls him his “inspiration.”

Dan tells him his flirting skills could use some work.

.

One night after Dan’s been living in Phil’s – their – apartment for enough nights that he’s lost count, he gets drunk off his ass for no reason other than just because (less than one half of the children of alcoholics become alcoholics themselves), and he lays out on the couch with his feet in Phil’s lap and his head propped up against the armrest at an awkward angle. He stares right through Phil’s head and into another dimension; Phil turns Animal Planet on the tele.

“My dad hated this, you know,” Dan says, and he startles Phil enough with his spontaneity to earn himself a long stare.

“Hated what?”

“This,” he says, and throws his hand up with an arm that’s half-numb to gesture to anything, everything, his life. “God, he hated it. He always said,” he breathes in through his nose, tries to clear the fog in his mind, “he always said, when I was younger, than he loved how unique I was, always said a bunch of ‘be your own person’ bullshit and rambled about philosophical who-the-fuck-knows, until he figured out that I started kissing boys in secondary school. And then all of that was over and done with, yaknow?”

The documentary on sea turtles living in captivity after being saved hums in his ears.

When he wakes up the next morning, all of his regret bubbles up and releases as a low groan that makes Phil laugh. He takes a Motrin and moves on.

.

“Mum says she wants to come up for a visit,” Dan says in the middle of their morning routine, as he’s pouring a cup of coffee for Phil, who’s shuffling papers and checking his hair in the blurry reflection of the microwave.

“Really?” Phil stops what he’s doing. “That’s great! When? How long?”

(Phil has only met Dan’s mum twice, one time outside of a hospital entrance. He really doesn’t have a reason he should be excited.)

Dan feels a grin unravel across his face. His blood warms.

.

The first time his dad calls it’s to ask for money, and Dan feels his blood reach a boiling point so fast he hangs up and stares at the ceiling for hours.

.

He goes to Christmas dinner at Phil’s grandparents’ house. There is a gift under the tree with his name on it. His internal organs twist, but almost in a pleasant sort of way.

.

He catches some hearsay from his too-nosy old schoolmates that his dad might have left the country, shacked up in Germany where his parents are from. Dan realizes, then, that he doesn’t really care. (Over one million people immigrated to Germany in 2013, after all.)

.

Starts talking to his mum every Sunday morning on the phone over coffee while Phil plays games on his phone across the room.

Notices his nails aren’t quite as bitten down as they used to be. Notices his fingers aren’t raw.

Buys expensive button-downs that make Phil laugh.

Cries with his mum when the house gets knocked down.

Gets a haircut.

Lives his life.

.

Daniel Howell is one face out of billions of others. He thinks too hard and eats too much, doesn’t see the sun as often as he should. He curses loudly. Eats slowly. Bangs his head on the light fixture in the kitchen if he’s not paying attention. But that’s alright.

It’ll be alright.


End file.
